To coincide with our Channel Islands tour this season (27 Apr-4 May) and our Passport section in the forthcoming Spring issue of JR, we’re hosting a series of free online talks open to all. Across four sessions, we’ll uncover the story of the Nazi Occupation on British soil, the effect this had on the small island communities and the reverberations it has left today.
Online events begin at 7.30pm (GMT). Streaming links* will be sent out shortly before each event. See below for full details.
*If you booked your ticket and have not received the link by 5pm on the day of the event, please check your spam folder and, if it's not there, email programming@jewishrenaissance.org.uk.
JR has an ethical ticketing policy and is offering free tickets to the online lectures, but if you can afford it, please donate to support our work. We are proposing denominations of 18 – the numerical value of the Hebrew word 'chai', meaning 'life'.
Tuesday 1 April
Occupation History
Discover the troubled history of the Channel Islands, the only British sovereign territory to be occupied by the Nazis during World War II. We’re delighted to welcome Gilly Carr OBE, professor of Conflict Archaeology and Holocaust Heritage at the University of Cambridge and a member of the UK delegation for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to lead this discussion, which will have a particular emphasis on the often overlooked Jewish dimension of the story.
Tuesday 8 April
Alderney
A panel discussion about how far the Nazis encroached on British life during World War II. Journalist Isobel Cockerell will draw from her prize-winning article, The Nazi Concentration Camps on British Soil the UK Government Tried to Forget; Gary Font talks about this father, who was interned on Alderney; and artist Piers Secunda shares the inspiration behind his thought-provoking, mixed-media artworks entitled Alderney: The Holocaust on British Soil.
Tuesday 15 April
Jersey
Learn all about wartime Jersey with writer Jenny LeCoat. She is the author of 2020 novel Hedy’s War (reissued in 2022 as The Girl From the Channel Islands), based on the real-life story of Hedwig Bercu, a Jewish woman who faked her own death to survive the Nazis. This is followed by her latest book, Beyond Summerland, about a small community recovering from war. LeCoat also wrote the script for Another Mother’s Son, a 2017 film based on the story of her great-aunt Louisa Gould, who harboured an escaped Russian prisoner of war in her Jersey home and was murdered in Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. LeCoat will appear in conversation with Monica Bohm-Duchen, co-organiser of our Channel Islands tour.
Tuesday 22 April
Guernsey
Join our exploration of the second-largest island in the Channel Islands, with a panel featuring Helen Glencross, head of heritage services at Guernsey Museums & Art Gallery; artist Fiona Richmond, whose exhibition Exile and Return marks the commemoration of the liberation of the Channel Islands from Nazi occupation; and Darren Vogel, the head of Guernsey’s Jewish community.
